70,000 gather in central square to dance like lunatics to latest craze

Newsroom

Related Topics

If 20,000 people liking a Facebook page calling on US president Barack Obama to speak in Tel Aviv doesn’t work, perhaps 70,000 people dancing like crazed lunatics to the “Latest Big Thing” will do the trick.

Obama or no, Tel Aviv became home to the largest “Harlem Shake” dance video yet over the weekend, hosting some 70,000 people in front of the Tel Aviv Museum shaking their moneymakers to the international and not-at-all annoying hit, according to organizers.

For the blissfully uninitiated, “Harlem Shake” videos, which have proliferated over the Internet, feature a single person dancing to an instrumental track by Baauer. Once the bass drops, the dancer is joined by a bunch of his friends — or in the case of Tel Aviv, 70,000 of his closest buddies.

The video was made during a pre-Purim street party at the central Tel Aviv square on Friday.

Tel Avivians aren’t the only ones having fun, though. On Thursday, the Western Wall plaza became home to another “Harlem Shake” video, with a few dozen Birthright students turning Judaism’s holiest site into meme fodder.

Not everybody loves the dance craze, insane as that may seem. Two soldiers were recently punished for a video of an artillery corps unit doing the shake. The soldier who produced the video was sentenced to 14 days in prison; his commanding officer, who approved the lark, was sentenced to 21 days behind bars and stripped of his command.